The good, the bad and the messy

When Ivana Hodak was shot twice in the head in the stairwell of her apartment block in Zagreb on 6 October, the political effect was immediate. Within hours, Prime Minister Ivo Sanader had fired his justice and police ministers as well as the chief of the national police.

Like the media, it appeared that the government was convinced that the murder, which is still unsolved, was commissioned by some or other godfather of organised crime.

Other recent, high-profile crimes perhaps increased the likelihood of a sharp political response: in September, the chief of Zagreb police was replaced following a series of brutal beatings in recent months of prominent businessmen and a journalist, none of which have been solved. Bank and other robberies have also been frequent in recent years, with few solved. But the particularity of the Hodak case is the complex mix of strands that connect her family and highly visible criminal cases, politics and crime and Croatia’s crime-riven post-Yugoslav years with its attempts to enter the EU.

The Zagorec connections

Ivana’s father, Zvonimir Hodak, represents a retired general, Vladimir Zagorec, who stands accused of stealing diamonds worth up to €4 million from the Ministry of Defence while he was deputy defence minister and the chief of arms procurement in the 1990s. Zagorec was extradited from Austria earlier this month to face trial in Croatia.

For the last three months of her life, Ivana Hodak, herself a trainee lawyer in her father’s office, dated Ljubo Pavasović Visković, a lawyers representing Hrvoje Petrač, an underworld enemy of Zagorec. It was Petrač who first made allegations against Zagorec.

Petrač is currently in jail serving a sentence for the abduction of Zagorec’s son.

Ivana Hodak’s parents have publicly alleged that Petrač is behind the murder of their daughter. They say Petrač had feared that, through her liaison with Visković, Ivana could have acquired compromising information about him that she could have passed on to Zagorec via her father.

The past in the present

Hodak’s murder prompted opposition calling on the government to resign and thousands of ordinary citizens to gather in central Zagreb to light candles in a silent protest against the mafia. And, like everyone in Croatia, the EU is convinced that Hodak’s murder was the work of organised crime: the European Commission swiftly urged Zagreb to do more to tackle organised crime.

This is clearly a problem for Croatia’s bid for membership. Croatia hopes to complete membership negotiations with Brussels next year and possibly join the EU in 2011. A critical Commission progress report on Croatia is due next month; in the past, these reports have often found Croatia’s justice and home affairs wanting.

Ministers in Zagreb now fear the perception of Croatia as a country in the grips of organised crime can slow down the membership negotiations. They recall the widespread misgivings about Bulgaria’s readiness to join due to Sofia’s failure to tackle organised crime, mafia-style killings in particular. Nearly two years since Bulgaria joined the EU, the influence of organised crime is still thought to be considerable, one reason why the EU is likely to be doubly cautious when it comes to assessing actions against organised crime in Croatia.

It is safe to say, though, the problem of underworld influence is worse elsewhere in the Balkans – and in some countries, such as Kosovo, much worse – than in relatively rich and orderly Croatia. While mafia-style murders and beatings do take place regularly, the overall numbers are nowhere near the levels in Serbia or Bulgaria. Murders of established businessmen or politicians are relatively rare. Some industries, such as the construction business, have attracted many players who do not shy from playing very dirty. The owner of a leading construction firm was gunned down in Zagreb in 2006, for instance. The murder remains unsolved.

As in much of the former communist world, contemporary Balkan organised crime was born in the chaos of the post-communist transition. The conflicts of the 1990s were obviously an additional element that enabled organised crime to flourish. With the exception of Slovenia, the state structures that emerged from the ruins of the former Yugoslavia relied, though to different extents, on underworld elements, not least because much of what they tried to achieve was, in fact, illegal. Throughout the region, people with frightening criminal records spanning continents became ministers and generals, with thousands of other thugs of differing calibre operating below them in formal or informal structures, usually shoulder to shoulder with the most corrupt elements of the former security services.

They handled anything from forcible removal of ethnically undesirable populations to illegal arms purchases and assassinations. General Zagorec’s brief, for example, was to circumvent the UN arms embargo. In the case he is now best known for, he is accused of stealing diamonds that were brought to the defence ministry by a foreign arms dealer as his guarantee that he would deliver an anti-aircraft system to Croatia. Croatian media have also speculated that the jewels in question had, in fact, been stolen from Croatian Jews in the Second World War and kept in secret treasure vaults belonging to the Catholic Church for use in needy times for the Croat nation.

People such as Zagorec and Petrač, who were once close collaborators, continued to play prominent roles in Balkan societies after the war, many succeeding in legalising and even legitimising their wartime loots. Their influence in the worlds of politics, business and the media now overlaps and often happily coexists with that of players with completely or relatively clean pasts.

“It is perfectly normal in Croatia to see a politician and a top mobster dining in the same restaurant and sometimes they even greet each other politely. We won’t eradicate the Mafia from the Croatian society as long as that’s considered normal,” says a former chief of Croatian national police.

Croatia’s overlapping worlds

The Hodak murder illustrates how these worlds overlap in today’s Croatia. Apart from her father being a defence council for Zagorec and her boyfriend defending Petrač, Ivana’s mother, Ljerka Mintas Hodak, once served in government with Zagorec as a deputy prime minister. Zagorec and Petrač were once close friends as well as collaborators. Petrač’s best man was a top security official and the two men are still close to a prominent journalist, who in turn was – until recently – a confidante of President Stjepan Mesić.

Which is perhaps where this and many other similar Balkan stories become interesting, if not necessarily less gloomy. For they never solely feature outright villains and dodgy types; they also include good guys. For more than a decade, Mesić has been Croatia’s leading voice of moderation when it comes to dealing with the ethnically motivated crimes of the 1990s. He is also one of the strongest advocates of the rule of law, even though in the early 1990s, when people like Zagorec made their first millions, Mesić used to raise funds from the Croatian diaspora in order to pay for illegal arms purchases handled by people like Zagorec.

And how exactly did Mesić persuade the diaspora to give him the money? He was filmed in 1990 with a group of Australian Croats, for whom he rather cheerfully eulogised the achievements of Croatia’s pro-Nazi regime in the Second World War.

None of that is to say that President Mesić and Prime Minister Sanader are not sincere when they say they want to deal a fatal blow to organised crime now, but it does show why the problem of organised crime in the region is so difficult to tackle even when there is enough political will.

Tihomir Loza is a long-time commentator on Balkan affairs and deputy director of Transitions Online.